1 FTP , the Internet File

The exponentially growing global Internet is a virtual innnite fountain of information, yet it can seem like an information labyrinth when you try to nd any speciic fact. Recently, a number of tools have been developed to assist users in nding information of interest. These resource discovery tools specialize in browsing, searching, and organizing information distributed throughout the Internet. In this paper we survey several existing Internet resource discovery services, and present a taxonomy of their characteristics and design decisions.